Best Tools for On‑Call Engineers: Rootly Beats the Rest

The complexity of modern software systems has fundamentally changed the role of on-call engineers. Being on-call in December 2025 isn't just about handling late-night alerts; it's about managing a constant stream of information, coordinating responses across teams, and trying to prevent burnout. Having the right set of tools is no longer a luxury—it's the key to transforming a chaotic incident response into a calm, controlled process. While many tools handle pieces of the puzzle, a platform like Rootly unifies the entire on-call toolkit. Effective on-call management requires a holistic approach, which is where a comprehensive tool stands out.

What’s Included in the Modern SRE Tooling Stack?

A modern Site Reliability Engineer's (SRE) toolkit isn't a single product but an ecosystem of specialized tools that must work together seamlessly. The challenge is ensuring these tools integrate without creating friction.

The essential categories of tools for on-call engineers include:

• Observability and Monitoring: These are your eyes and ears. Tools like Datadog, Grafana, and Splunk collect metrics, logs, and traces to tell you that something is wrong with your system.
• Alerting and On-Call Scheduling: Platforms such as PagerDuty and Opsgenie are designed to manage schedules, rotations, and escalations, ensuring the right person gets notified at the right time.
• Incident Management: This is the command center for coordinating, communicating, and resolving incidents. It’s the platform that guides the team from detection to resolution, a domain where Rootly excels.
• Collaboration: Communication hubs like Slack or Microsoft Teams are where engineers collaborate to solve the problem.

The biggest challenge for SREs today is tool sprawl and the constant context switching it demands. The most effective setup integrates these functions into a single, automated workflow. Instead of relying on traditional, reactive methods, teams benefit from AI-powered monitoring and management to get ahead of issues.

A Deep Dive into the Best Tools for On-Call Engineers

With dozens of tools available, choosing the right ones is critical [2]. The best approach is to select a central platform that integrates with the specialized tools your team already uses.

Rootly: The All-in-One Incident Management Platform

Rootly serves as the central hub that connects and automates the entire incident lifecycle. It doesn't just manage one piece of the puzzle; it orchestrates everything from initial alert to final retrospective.

Key differentiators include:

• End-to-End Workflow Automation: Rootly automates the procedural work so engineers can focus on the problem. It can automatically create a Slack channel, page the correct on-call engineer, start a Zoom bridge, and generate a post-incident review.
• Deep Integrations: A powerful incident management platform must connect to your existing tools. Rootly offers deep integrations with over 100 popular tools, including Datadog, PagerDuty, Jira, and Slack, creating a unified command center directly within your existing workflows.
• AI-Powered Insights: Features like "Ask Rootly AI" and automated incident summaries accelerate learning and reduce the manual effort of post-incident analysis.
• DevOps Incident Management: Rootly empowers a "you build it, you run it" culture. It gives development teams the tools and autonomy they need to take ownership of their services during an incident, streamlining communication and resolution.

PagerDuty & Opsgenie: The Alerting Specialists

PagerDuty and Opsgenie are powerful and popular tools for on-call scheduling and alert routing [1]. Their core strengths lie in creating flexible schedules, delivering reliable notifications across multiple channels (SMS, push, phone call), and defining complex escalation policies [6].

However, their primary focus is on alerting, not the full incident management process [4]. Once an engineer acknowledges an alert, the team typically moves to other tools like Slack, Jira, and Confluence to manage the actual response. This is where Rootly adds critical value by integrating with these alerting tools. It takes their alerts and uses them as triggers to launch comprehensive, automated incident response workflows, closing the gap between notification and resolution.

Grafana OnCall: The Open-Source Alternative

For teams heavily invested in the Grafana observability stack, Grafana OnCall presents a strong open-source option [7]. Its main advantages are that it's free to use, integrates tightly with Grafana dashboards and alerting, and is highly customizable for teams with specific needs [5].

However, these benefits come with trade-offs. Open-source tools like Grafana OnCall often require significant engineering effort to set up, maintain, and scale. They may also lack the polished user experience and advanced, enterprise-grade features—such as AI-powered insights and no-code workflow builders—found in a dedicated platform like Rootly.

From Monitoring to Postmortems: How SREs Use Rootly

Rootly adds value at every stage of an incident, transforming a stressful event into a structured process.

• Detection & Alert Consolidation: Rootly ingests alerts from any monitoring tool your team uses, like Datadog or Splunk. It then uses AI and configurable workflows to reduce alert fatigue by deduplicating and grouping related signals into a single, actionable incident.
• Response & Coordination: Once an incident is declared, Rootly automates the initial response. It can create a dedicated Slack channel, invite the right responders based on on-call schedules, assign an incident commander, and start a detailed timeline. This ensures that every incident follows a consistent, best-practice process. Rootly manages the entire incident lifecycle from a single platform.
• Resolution & Automation: During an incident, Rootly's workflows can trigger automated remediation actions. For example, it can run an Ansible playbook, restart a service, or even execute a Kubernetes rollback, all without leaving Slack.
• Learning & Improvement (Postmortems): After the incident is resolved, Rootly automatically generates a retrospective with a complete timeline, key metrics like Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR), and AI-generated summaries. This transforms incidents from failures into valuable learning opportunities that build long-term reliability and help foster autonomous SRE teams.

Focus on Kubernetes: The Ultimate SRE Observability Stack

Monitoring dynamic, ephemeral Kubernetes environments presents unique challenges. A modern SRE observability stack for Kubernetes requires layers to manage this complexity effectively.

• Data Layer (Collection): This layer gathers the raw data. It typically includes Prometheus for metrics, FluentBit for logs, and OpenTelemetry for traces.
• Intelligence & Action Layer (Orchestration): This is where Rootly operates. It connects to the data layer to make sense of the signals and automates the appropriate response.

Rootly's native Kubernetes integration allows it to pull critical context about deployments, pods, and services directly into the incident channel. This enables powerful automations, like triggering a kubectl rollout undo command directly from a Rootly workflow, which can drastically reduce MTTR for failed deployments.

Why Rootly Wins: A Side-by-Side Comparison

While specialized tools excel in one area, Rootly provides a comprehensive solution that covers the entire incident management process [8]. Here’s how the tools stack up.

Feature

Rootly

Alerting Tools (PagerDuty/Opsgenie)

Open-Source (Grafana OnCall)

On-Call Scheduling

Basic

Advanced

Good

Alert Routing

Good (via integrations)

Advanced

Good

Automated Incident Response

Advanced & AI-Powered

Basic/None

Manual/Scripted

Retrospectives & Learning

Advanced & Automated

Manual/None

Manual

Integrations

Extensive (100+)

Focused

Limited

Ease of Use & Setup

Enterprise-Ready

Enterprise-Ready

High Engineering Effort

This comparison makes it clear that while some tools are essential for parts of the process, only Rootly brings everything together under one roof [3].

Conclusion: Build a Calmer, More Resilient On-Call Culture with Rootly

While specialized alerting and scheduling tools are good at what they do, modern on-call engineering is a multi-faceted challenge that requires a unified solution. Juggling multiple platforms during a high-stress incident creates confusion and slows down resolution.

Rootly is the platform that provides a comprehensive, end-to-end solution for DevOps incident management, from the initial alert to the final retrospective. By automating toil, centralizing communication, and providing intelligent insights, Rootly allows engineers to focus on what they do best: solving complex problems. It helps teams build a culture of calm reliability, which is the ultimate goal for any modern engineering organization.

Ready to see how Rootly can transform your on-call process? Book a demo today.

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